Why the prevalence of alt keybindings

[rcorre]

I've noticed helix chooses to use a lot of "Alt-" bindings, even in cases where "Ctrl-" is unbound.
All the applications I use daily primarily use "Ctrl" as a modifier. I hardly need "Alt" for anything outside helix.
That makes this seem like an unusual design decisions, but I checked the FAQ, docs, and discussions, and didn't find an explanation.

I'm curious for a few reasons:

• Since I always need ctrl and almost never use alt, I use a keyboard layout where ctrl is very easy to reach and alt is hard to reach, which works well for most applications
• My terminal (st) does not appear to send alt to applications. Maybe there's a way to fix this, but a cursory internet search is failing me, and it's not something I've ever needed before.
• New features seem to favor adding more alt keybinds, e.g. implementing picker preview scrolling #4189 (which matters because picker keybinds currently are not mappable).

[ni-be]

Sure there are some bindings use ALT but most that do also have alternatives. But I share your sentiment I had to remove / change some of them because I use Zellij / Multiplexer the same way I use a Tiling window WM but instead of Super as mod I use Alt for Zellij so there were 6 conflicts.